William of Ockham (Occam, c. 1280—c.

1349)

1. Ockham was a major force of change at the end of the middle Ages. He was a
courageous man with an uncommonly sharp mind. His philosophy was radical in his
day and continues to provide insight into current philosophical debates.
2. The principle of simplicity is the central theme of Ockham’s approach, so much so
that this principle has come to be known as “Ockham’s Razor.” Ockham uses the
razor to eliminate unnecessary hypotheses. 
3. In metaphysics, Ockham champions nominalism, the view that universal essences,
such as humanity or whiteness, are nothing more than concepts in the mind. 
4.  He develops an Aristotelian ontology, admitting only individual substances and
qualities. In epistemology, Ockham defends direct realist empiricism, according to
which human beings perceive objects through “intuitive cognition,” without the help
of any innate ideas.
5. These perceptions give rise to all of our abstract concepts and provide knowledge of
the world.
6. In logic, Ockham presents a version of supposition theory to support his commitment
to mental language. Supposition theory had various purposes in medieval logic, one
of which was to explain how words bear meaning. 
7. Methodologically, Ockham fits comfortably within the analytic philosophical
tradition. He considers himself a devoted follower of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.),
whom he calls “The Philosopher,” though most Aristotle scholars would find many of
his interpretations dubious.
8. Ockham published several philosophical works before losing official status as an
academic. The first was his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a
standard requirement for medieval theology students. 
9. By commenting on this book, students would learn the art of argumentation while at
the same time developing their own views. As a student, Ockham also wrote several
commentaries on the works of Aristotle.
10. Ockham’s opus magnum, however, is his Suma Logicae, in which he lays out the
fundamentals of his logic and its accompanying metaphysics. 
11. Ockham’s razor is the principle of parsimony or simplicity according to which the
simpler theory is more likely to be true. Ockham did not invent this principle; it is
found in Aristotle, Aquinas, and other philosophers Ockham read. 
12. For Ockham, the principle of simplicity limits the multiplication of hypotheses not
necessarily entities. Favouring the formulation “It is useless to do with more what can
be done with less,” Ockham implies that theories are meant to do things, namely,
explain and predict, and these things can be accomplished more effectively with
fewer assumptions.
13. Although the razor seems like common sense in everyday situations, when used in
science, it can have surprising and powerful effects. For example, in his classic
exposition of theoretical physics, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
attributes the discovery of quantum mechanics to Ockham’s razor.
14. At bottom, Ockham advocates simplicity in order to reduce the risk of error. Every
hypothesis carries the possibility that it may be wrong. The more hypotheses you
accept, the more you increase your risk. Ockham strove to avoid error at all times,
even if it meant abandoning well-loved, traditional beliefs. This approach helped to
earn him his reputation as destroyer of the medieval synthesis of faith and reason.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) 

1. A French philosopher and a rationalist in the Cartesian tradition. But he was also

an Oratorian priest in the Catholic Church. 
2. Malebranche made some notable contributions to physics, working within a broadly
Cartesian framework but nevertheless prepared to depart from Descartes where
necessary. 
3. He argued that different colors resulted out of different frequencies in the pressure
vibrations of subtle matter, much as different musical tones derived from different
frequencies in the vibrations of air.
4. His theory was presented as a corrective to Descartes' view, rather than a refutation
thereof, but it has important parallels with the rival optical theory of Isaac Newton.
Newton had already developed his position some thirty years earlier, but
Malebranche probably would not have been aware of it until it was finally published in
the Opticks of 1704, or, more likely, in its Latin translation of 1706.
5. Malebranche wrote on the laws of motion, a topic he discussed extensively
with Leibniz. He also wrote on mathematics and, although he made no major
mathematical discoveries of his own, he was instrumental in introducing and
disseminating the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz in France. Malebranche
introduced l'Hôpital to Johann Bernoulli, with the ultimate result being the publication
of the first textbook in infinitesimal calculus.
6. Malebranche also developed an original theory related to preformationism,
postulating that each embryo probably contained even smaller embryos ad infinitum,
like an idealized Matryoshka doll. According to Malebranche, "an infinite series of
plants and animals were contained within the seed or the egg, but only naturalists
with sufficient skill and experience could detect their presence"
7. Berkeley, admittedly, did reject the theory of vision in God. "It is evident", he insisted,
"that the things I perceive are my own ideas."[5] But he was influenced by
Malebranche's occasionalism, even though he excluded the activity of created minds
from its domain.
8. As a rationalist, Malebranche places great emphasis on the importance of
Reason. In tracing out some of the consequences of this identification of Reason
with the Divine Word, the student of Malebranche is quickly immersed in a wide
range of his favorite theological and philosophical ideas.
9. In general, occasionalism is the view that there are no efficient causes in the full
sense other than God. Created things are at best "occasions" for divine activity.
Bodies and minds act neither on themselves nor on each other; God alone brings
about all the phenomena of nature and the mind.
Francisco Suárez (1548—1617)
1. His writings are sometimes said to contain the whole of scholastic philosophy
because in addressing a question he surveys the full range of scholastic positions—
Thomist, Scotist, nominalist, and others—before affirming one of those positions or
presenting his own variant.
2. Suárez’s writing served as one of the key conduits through which medieval
philosophy influenced early modern philosophy. Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff,
among others, learned scholasticism at least in part from reading Suárez, a
scholasticism from which they then borrowed in developing their own philosophical
theories.
3. In 1597, the same year that Disputationes metaphysicae was published, 
4. By Suárez’s time, Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (henceforth, ST) had to some extent
replaced Lombard’s Sentences as the standard theological textbook and subject of
commentaries. Many of Suárez’s works are offered as commentaries on particular
sections of ST.
5. Last but certainly not least, Suárez’s best-known and most influential work is
his Disputationes metaphysicae (“Metaphysical Disputations”; henceforth, DM). The
work is meant to cover the questions pertaining to the twelve books
of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but part of its significance lies in its not being a
commentary on Aristotle’s work and not following its organization.
6. DM is divided into two main parts. The first part deals with the object of
metaphysics, the concept of being, the transcendentals (that is, the essential
properties of being as such, namely, unity, truth, and goodness), and the causes of
beings. The second part deals with the divisions of being, first into infinite and finite.
Finite being is then divided into substance and accident, with the latter then divided
into the nine categories familiar from Aristotle. The last disputation concerns beings
of reason, which, strictly speaking, fall outside the scope of metaphysics on Suárez’s
conception, but an understanding of which is helpful for understanding metaphysics.
7. The first thing to note when trying to get one’s bearings with Suárez’s thought is that
he, like many other scholastic authors, is a Christian Aristotelian.
8. His thought is so thoroughly imbued with both Christianity and Aristotelianism that
it would be difficult to find a single page in his writings not containing obvious traces
of both. As is well-known, Aristotle says some things incompatible with orthodox
Christianity, such as that the world had no beginning, so an orthodox Christian must
modify Aristotelianism to some degree.
9. More particularly, Roman Catholic doctrines—and that his philosophical framework
and conceptions are rooted in Aristotle.
10. As scholars of medieval philosophy well know, this Aristotelian legacy leaves
considerable room for philosophical disputes, in part due to unanswered questions,
in part due to answers susceptible to differing interpretations. The three authors
most frequently cited by Suárez are Aristotle, Aquinas, and Scotus, in that order.
11. Suárez considers metaphysics a unified science in the Aristotelian sense. The function
of a science is to demonstrate the properties of its object through the latter’s
principles and causes (DM 1.1.27 and 1.3.1). The term “properties” here is not being
used in its wide contemporary sense but rather to refer to features necessarily
possessed by the members of a kind yet not essential to them.